Mario Vargas Llosa
Good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is, without a doubt, hard work. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular, there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.Collection: Patience
I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.Collection: Amazing
Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don't believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life.Collection: Imagination
If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.Collection: Respect
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.Collection: Attitude
Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.Collection: Equality
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
What is essential in love is what the French call 'amour fou.' What is that in English? Crazy love? That doesn't sound as beautiful. It's a total kind of love that not only embraces feelings, actions, but a kind of understanding of the world from the perspective of love.
Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.
Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.
Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.
Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.
To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.
The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.
Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.
When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.
I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.
Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
Eroticism is born at a time in civilisation when sexual instinct becomes deanimalised and enriched with contributions from art and from literature. A world of theatricality emerges around the act of love.
Couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.
In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.
When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.
My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.
I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.
I am not going to participate in professional politics again.
If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.
Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.
I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.
I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.
Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.
I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.
I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.
In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.
The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.
I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.
I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.
Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.
When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.
A novel is something, while despair is nothing.
I never get the feeling that I've decided rationally, cold-bloodedly to write a story. On the contrary, certain events or people, sometimes dreams or readings, impose themselves suddenly and demand attention.
I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.
I thought that, when I came to New York, that I would have a very life here for three months or three and a half months. And my impression is that it won't be so quiet as I wanted.